by L. E. Flynn
“What are you getting him? A new sleeping bag?” As far as I knew, Mark didn’t like the outdoors any more than my sister did. He was a swimmer, so the pool was his second home.
“No,” she said. “Something else. I’m gonna surprise him.”
Mark’s Instagram was public—I’m sure you saw it, before it got taken down. It was basically the chronology of a golden boy. Witness the great swim champion, arms raised in victory. See him at the beach with his shaved chest, hairless and tanned. At a party, a drink in each hand, a girl under each arm.
Then there’s my sister’s Instagram, the Tabby and Mark show. Kissing on a porch swing. Pressed together on Elle’s deck, sweaty from the summer heat, both in jean shorts and tank tops. They say married couples start to look alike—I don’t know if it’s true, my parents just look bored—but the truth is, Tabby has always started to look like her boyfriends. In little ways, at first. When she was with Beck, she bought a leather jacket.
Then she changes in other ways. Starts to mimic their personalities and mannerisms. When she was Beck’s girlfriend, I was “sweetheart” and my parents needed to “chill.” Maybe she doesn’t even know she’s doing it.
Tabby stopped briefly in the women’s clothing section, fingering the edge of a sports bra. Then I followed her through a display of yoga mats and running shoes, straight into a wall of backpacks. Some of them were practically as tall as me, the kind people brought on a summer trek through Europe.
“Is Mark planning a trip?” I asked.
“No. I mean, maybe. We talked about going somewhere. But not until I’m finished with school. What I’m looking for is something like this.” She pulled a camouflage-print backpack off the rack, holding it up like a trophy.
“It’s, uh … kind of ugly.”
“It’s totally ugly. But Mark will love it. He told me he wants to do more hiking and outdoorsy crap. I’m trying to be more supportive of his lifestyle. See, this one has pockets for water bottles and everything.”
“Okay,” I said. “Whatever you say.”
We walked up to the checkout. I stared at the assortment of freeze-dried foods near the cash register with a mixture of curiosity and disgust.
“He wants me to hike the Mayflower with him,” Tabby said. “Before summer ends. Isn’t that where you had your cross-country regionals last year? And where we went running once?”
I was surprised she remembered it, but I let the feeling pool in my stomach like warm butter. The memory is less my gold medal and more Tabby screaming at the finish line, arms in the air, shirt raised to show her stomach. There was a sign on the ground in front of her, bristol board with glitter paint. I ♡ YOU BRIDGE!!!!!
“Yeah,” I said. “The Mayflower Trail. There are a ton of roots. You basically have to stare at the ground the whole time.”
“Duly noted,” Tabby said. When we got to the car, she thanked me. The backpack was slung over her shoulder. It looked funny there, the camo against the baby pink of her tank top.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said.
“Typical Bridge. You always think you didn’t do anything. Sometimes just being somewhere with somebody is enough.”
It was exactly the kind of thing Tabby said that made me remember how deep she is, how thoughtful. People tend to think girls like Tabby are surface level. That if you like makeup and partying, you can’t also like books or care about world issues. Tabby is the wild one. I’m the workhorse. She’s the girly one. I’m the sporty one. She’s the slut, and I’m the prude. She’s the bad one, and I’m the good one. The universe is always trying to split girls in half. Half angel, half demon. No wonder so many of us turn into monsters.
I know every inch of the Mayflower Trail. Every root, every bump in the ground, every twist and turn, like a book with a plot that surprised me the first time around, but not anytime after that, because I’m smart enough to see everything coming.
“It’s really easy to get lost in there,” I said. Hot air puffed out when I opened my car door.
“Good thing you drew me a map,” she said with a wink.
I never told Tabby this, but one of the times I ran the trail over the summer, I smelled something other than dirt and old leaves. Pot smoke. Then I heard the laughter. It was a group of guys, sitting on the fallen tree trunk just over two miles into my route, where the Cider Creek trail ends and the Mayflower begins. Tabby hated when I ran in the woods alone. “It’s dangerous,” she would say, sounding more like a stern parent than our actual parents.
“I know where I’m going,” I always said defiantly, even though I liked that she worried about me. It felt good, somehow, to be doing something dangerous enough for somebody to worry about.
“Yeah, you do,” she said. “That’s not the problem. The problem is someone else knowing where you’re going, too.”
She made me promise not to run with earbuds in. You never know who’s watching, she told me. So I kept the promise. Besides, I like hearing my feet hit the ground, having my breath be the soundtrack to my route. Harder and more labored going up Salt Hill, almost like a hiss going back down. The only people I ever saw that deep in the woods were random hikers or the same two middle-aged women with sweaters tied around their waists, greyhound dogs running ahead of them.
Except that day, I saw boys. Then I saw who was among them. Mark and his friend Keegan, the one Tabby didn’t like. Mark had something in his hand. A joint. Don’t get me wrong, I have no issue with people smoking pot. But Mark was always Mr. Anti-Drugs, the poster child for Don’t Kill Brain Cells. I’d heard him chastise my sister more than once for drinking before they headed out to some party, even though he drank, too. I also remembered him telling Tabby he couldn’t believe she had tried pot, because he thought she was better than that.
Mark’s gaze flickered over me, then he looked down. He was going to pretend he didn’t know who I was. His eyes, in the moment ours met, held some kind of warning. Don’t tell your sister. I could feel the other guys leering at my bare legs and the strip of stomach my tank top didn’t cover. It was the exact way boys never looked at me before, but their collective gaze didn’t empower me like I expected it would. For the first time, I did feel scared in the woods—a girl under the trees, too far away for anyone to hear her scream. For the first time, I turned around instead of completing my full loop.
“Tell her yourself,” I shouted over my shoulder, increasing my speed as the guys laughed.
People are saying that Tabby isn’t a nice girl. But I grew up with her, and they didn’t. She brought me soup in bed when I was sick, and they didn’t. She took me to the hairdresser to fix the terrible dye job I tried to do myself, and they didn’t. She cried to me when her first boyfriend broke up with her—because she wouldn’t put out—and they didn’t. She raged to me when that first boyfriend spread rumors about her being terrible in bed, a bed she was never even in. They didn’t.
They don’t know my sister. I do.
I wondered how fast I could run in the woods that day. Maybe Tabby had to figure out the exact same thing.
15
SLATE FORD
SALESPERSON, REI BOULDER
YEAH, THAT GIRL? She was in the store, asking a whole bunch of questions. Of course I went over and helped her. You always want to chat up the hot ones.
Told me she was going on a hike. Didn’t say where. Said it was with her boyfriend. I thought maybe she was making up a boyfriend so I wouldn’t hit on her.
She asked about jackets. Said it was gonna be a long hike. Then boots. Said she didn’t want anything too heavy on her feet.
Then she picked up a walking pole and said, This could be a murder weapon. Laughed. I laughed, too, because she was kidding. Maybe even flirting. She left without buying anything, and I didn’t have the balls to ask her out.
They’re gonna say it was normal for her to be in the store if she knew she was going on a hike. But I read the news and she’s saying the hike got sprung on her partway through August.
That it was his idea.
If that’s true, why the hell was she in the store talking about the hike back in May?
Excerpt from Tabby’s Diary
September 13, 2018
I haven’t written in a while, but I’ve been busy. It’s hard with Mark back at Princeton. I knew it would be hard, but I thought we would still be us. I’m still me, but he’s not him anymore. He’s someone who doesn’t have time for me, or at least not the time he promised. Plus, I can’t seem to stop stalking his Instagram and seeing there are other girls in the photos. He told me we’d Skype every night, but he has excuses. Like having to go to bed super early for practice, except then I’ll see someone tagged him in a photo from a party. He used to text me back instantly, almost before I was done hitting send. Now it takes hours.
Maybe I’m just being paranoid. I’m trying to be the cool girl, but it’s hard. A month until he’s back, for the homecoming game. Maybe I just need to make him miss me more.
THE GAZETTE
September 16, 2019
Map, diary found in home of dead hiker’s girlfriend
By Sally Kelly
A search of the Coldcliff, Colorado, home of Tabitha Cousins, 17, has revealed a map to the Split, the lookout point from which her boyfriend, Mark Forrester, 20, fell to his death on August 16. The map appeared to be hand-drawn, although it hasn’t been confirmed whether Cousins was the one who drew it.
A diary kept by Cousins was also recovered, but police haven’t revealed what, if anything, the diary reveals about Cousins’s relationship with Forrester. Evidence is expected to be analyzed in the coming weeks. In the meantime, as previously reported by the Coldcliff Tribune, police are continuing to search Cousins’s phone records from the weeks leading up to the fateful hike.
16
ELLE
I DON’T KNOW HOW THINGS changed so quickly, how Tabby went from being Mark’s widow—it’s a morbid expression, but I heard it somewhere and it stuck—to being a suspect. Or a person of interest, as she called it. Because Mark’s death is no longer considered just a tragedy, or an accident.
Mark’s death is now basically a murder.
And as far as everyone knows, there was only one person in the woods with him that night.
I don’t know if it was the YouTube video or something the police found that they haven’t disclosed, but everything’s different now. Tabby has pretty much been quarantined at her house, and they have a warrant to search her cell phone. Yesterday she called me from her parents’ landline.
“It’ll blow over,” she said, followed by a laugh. I had no idea how she could make a joke.
“What if it doesn’t?” I said. “What if they actually think you did it?”
“They already think I did it, Elle. But they won’t be able to prove a goddamn thing.”
She must be scared, under it all. She must be terrified. But Tabby never lays all her cards on the table. She rarely lets people know she’s hurting. Even me—I’m her best friend, and it’s like she still wants to protect me from something. From herself, maybe.
Lou Chamberlain is in my first-period English class. She’s nice enough to me in public and always sends me Facebook invites to her parties, but she’s the one who posted the video. She’s the reason why everyone’s eyes are on Tabby. Something like two hundred thousand sets of eyes—how many people saw that video before it was taken down? The comments still dart in front of me, the things people said. Violent. Crazy. Psycho bitch.
I told anyone who would listen that Lance provoked her. Nobody cares. They share a common enemy, and now she has been ousted.
I force myself to march up to Lou’s desk, even though I hate confrontation. “Why did you do it? Why did you post that video? Do you realize what you’ve done to Tabby?”
Lou arches a blond eyebrow. She’s pretty, in a generic way. I don’t know what Beck sees in her. Civilization, maybe. Or it could be that he just ran out of girls.
“What I’ve done? Honey, somebody had to do it. Don’t hate the messenger.”
“What do you have against her? She never did anything to you.”
Lou squints, like she’s seeing me for the first time. “Maybe you don’t know her as well as you think. Maybe she wanted it that way.”
I grip my knuckles and picture the mark they would leave on Lou’s petal skin. “What the hell are you even talking about?”
“Just—never mind. But honestly, do you think it adds up, her version of the story? Ask yourself that. All I want is justice to be served.”
“You didn’t even know Mark,” I say. She didn’t. The closest she and Mark ever got was attending a few of the same parties, with dozens of bodies between them. They’d probably never exchanged a word.
“I’m not saying I did,” she says. “But he didn’t deserve how he died.”
Sometimes—in this dark part of my brain—I think Mark planned all of this. The hike was his idea. Obviously. I mean, Tabby hated exercise. Bridget inherited all of the athletic ability in that family. Tabby and I used to joke that we were the two laziest people in existence, two overgrown house cats.
“Mark wants to go on a hike,” she told me. I think it was the Monday before he died, and we were at the Brody Community Pool. I have a pool in my backyard, but my dad hates taking care of it, so we always end up at Brody instead. I like it better there anyway. More opportunities to see and be seen.
“Does Mark know you? That’s hilarious. What did you tell him?”
She spread her towel onto a lounger. “I told him I didn’t have hiking shoes.”
I sat down beside Tabby and kicked off my flip-flops. “And then what?”
“Then he said don’t worry about it. That I could just wear a pair of Bridge’s running shoes. I should take an interest in his hobbies, right? He says his coach is on him to do some cross-training outside of the pool. Like, work on his leg strength or whatever.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But does he take an interest in yours?”
I couldn’t see Tabby’s eyes behind her sunglasses, but I imagined she was rolling them. “What, he should support all the reality TV we watch? It’s not like I’m on a sports team. Or ever will be.”
I knew I wasn’t going to win this argument. I didn’t want to have an argument. Tabby and I barely ever fought, but when we did, we were two opposing storm fronts, both hurtling too fast to turn back first. Besides, we were still in the frosty aftermath of my confession from last week, because Tabby wanted to pretend I never told her the things I’d whispered in the dark. It was easier that way.
I saw him with another girl. It was dark. I couldn’t tell if they were kissing but their heads were really close—
“Oh, great,” Tabby said, stretching out her legs. “We’re being watched.”
I sucked in a breath when I saw who was watching us. Lou. She was wearing a high-waisted polka dot bikini, a knockoff of something I remembered seeing Taylor Swift wear in her Kennedy phase. Basically everything about Lou was an imitation of somebody else.
“Just ignore her,” I said, grabbing my water bottle, wishing it was filled with something stronger.
“I’m surprised she went anywhere without her boyfriend,” Tabby said, making the word sound hideous.
“She didn’t,” I mumbled. Because there was Beck, ridiculously out of place somewhere bright and loud like this. He was in profile and staring through the chain-link fence that surrounded the pool.
Tabby laughed. “I guess he doesn’t own swim trunks.”
I thought of what was underneath Beck’s T-shirt. The tattoos. Somebody who was willing to put so many things on his skin wouldn’t be like every other boy. Unwilling to commit to anything more than a blow job at a party.
But I was wrong about Beck. I imagined him being tamed by some mysterious powers I never had. I felt his hand covering mine, his hair falling onto my face as he fused kisses to my forehead. Maybe his silence was my favorite thing about him, his ability to be quiet when everyone else was lo
ud. I filled in that silence with what I wanted to hear. I liked my own fiction more than the reality of who he really is. And I let my own fiction ruin everything.
“So you’re actually going on this hike?” I ventured, because anything was better than thinking about Beck.
Tabby stared up at the sky. At first I thought she was ignoring me, then her words landed with a thud. “I’d do anything for him, Elle. Like, anything at all. Sometimes it scares me.”
Tabby is a romantic—that’s something most people don’t know about her. If you’ve ever been in a class with her, you probably think she doesn’t pay attention, because she never puts her hand up to answer any questions. She makes fun of girls who love romantic comedies, girls who ditch their friends when they get a boyfriend, but she’s one of them. She wants the great love story.
I suspected Mark didn’t want the same thing. But I never knew what he wanted instead, or what he expected Tabby to do in the woods with him that day. Or what he tried to do when she wouldn’t do it.
Now Lou isn’t paying attention to me anymore—she’s staring at her face in a Sephora makeup mirror. “Maybe he did deserve it,” I say as the bell rings, my voice drowned out by the din. “Maybe he deserved worse.”
Text message from Tabitha Cousins to Mark Forrester,
September 13, 2018, 6:52 a.m.
17
BECK
Coldcliff Police Station, September 16, 3:05 p.m.
OFFICER OLDMAN: Let’s talk about your relationship with Mark Forrester.
BECK: We didn’t have one. He was some guy I saw a couple times at parties. That’s all.
OFFICER OLDMAN: Some guy whose nose you almost broke. Isn’t that right?
BECK: We got into it a bit. Once. It happens when people are drinking at a party. And he came at me. The guy was jealous. I guess he saw Tabby talking to me and was pissed off.